MOHSIN HAMID at Seattle University

Co-presented with the GARDNER CENTER FOR ASIAN ART & IDEAS and TASVEER.

Coinciding with the annual Aina Festival (www.tasveer.org) is this special Seattle return by one of the most essential literary writers at work in the world today, Mohsin Hamid. He makes this welcome Seattle return from his home in Lahore, Pakistan for his utterly timely, masterful new novel, Exit West (Riverhead). The author of Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and Discontent and Its Civilizations, tells the ordinary story of two people almost forced together by propulsive events out of their control, those forces eventually making their journey one of displacement and exile. This is a story of two caught in this maelstrom - and of many more.

“It was as if Hamid knew what was going to happen to America and the world, and gave us a road map to our future… This book blew the top off my head. It’s at once terrifying and, in the end, oddly hopeful.” –Ayelet Waldman, New York Times Book Review.

“You identify with the struggles and sorrows of the migrants; you understand, at least a little bit, the conditions that refugees are trying to escape. Most powerfully, we are encouraged to imagine the characters’ painful choices—why they might subject their families to incredibly risky boat voyages, and why they might leave other family members behind to die…If refugees are murderers, their crimes are generally based on impossible decisions about family, love, and memory—crimes that are very, very different from what Trump would want you to believe.” –BookForum.